Dragon*Con: Day 1

I made it to Dragon*Con (Woot!) The con is spread out across 3 hotels with the Space, Science, and Podcasting tracks (and me) in the Hilton, and the check in in the Hyatt with the Marriott in between. Being a bit sleepy (I was up until terrible hours the past two nights working on academic presentation posters for the EPO conference next week), I stupidly thought we (and the tracks) were staying in the Hyatt. I was wrong. So our first adventure of the day was trying to check in at the Hyatt, then walking three hotels to the Hilton, than walking back to the Hyatt to check in with the conference. It was during that last step (where we were inline 2 people behind John Delancy), that I learned I was supposed to give a reading (from my Blog) at 1pm. It was 3pm when we learned this, so I moved on.

First things first, I checked in with my tracks and got to meet Derek from Skepticality for the first time in person! After discovering there are far too many ways to spend my money here, I sat in on a live recording of Geologic by George Hrab (who does not talk on geology). He is hilarious. At the end of that show, I complimented the person who’d been sitting in front of me for having the cooled died hair I’ve seen (red types on natural black hair with blue midnight highlights. After we were talking for a bit, she had one of those stop talking half way through a sentence and ask, “Who are you?” moments. It turns out she recognized me from Astronomy Cast and the guy who was with her did a total “Oh my God, I love your show!” on me when he heard my name. To which I responded with a “Oh my God, you’re the first random person to do that to me in person!” So I got a picture with him. Woot2!

A few hours and chicken fingers later, I was on a Moon Hoax panel with two folks who’d been alive during the Apollo Era, Bill Keel and Hugh Gregory. I learned there are times I’m just not in the same league because, well, I just wasn’t alive and can’t speak to things the same way. But it was fun and (all though I had one total lose of knowns moment and one terrible foot in mouth moment when Hugh renamed me Jenny, and I corrected him, and he said he’d been under the impression I was Jenny from JPL the whole evening, so clearly I was a hoax, and I responded “Could someone please debunk me,” which when said aloud is far more terrible than when written on a screen).

And now it is 1am.

And now I am going to bed, eager to go out and meet future listeners, freaks, geeks, and all my favorite type of people tomorrow.

4 Comments

Well, I’m glad you learned about this afternoon’s podcast session earlier than two hours afterward, or I wouldn’t have gotten to deliver Doc’s message! Nice to meet you, and again, I really enjoyed the session! You and Kevin had a great banter going.

Hi, this is CarrieP of the famous colored hair whicih you speak of in this blog. It was quite awesome to meet you at Dragon*Con. Your panel about bad science in movies was highly enjoyable.

I’ve been an Astronomy Cast fan for months now, but never hopped over to your blog. Can’t for the life of me figure out why, Phil Plait talks it up quite frequently.

Well, I’m here now.

Thanks again for the comments on my hair. I really couldn’t evaluate it objectively.

James

Sep 22, 2007

Hey! Once again, it was excellent finally getting to meet you. If you recall, we had discussed getting recorded questions from younger people, Junior High and High School students… Just wanted to let you know that I’ve been in touch with the curriculum appropriate teachers and things are looking good. I dropped a similiar, slightly more detailed, line to your SIUE email account awhile back, though from perusing the blog you seemed busy enough that you may have missed it :). However it happened, we do need to talk about waviers for recording when you’ve got some time to bounce emails around.